According with Wikipedia smart grid delivers electricity from suppliers to consumers using two-way digital technology to control appliances at consumers’ homes to save energy, reduce cost and increase reliability and transparency.

As we can see from this talk the USA government has a growing interest in the Smart Grid topic:

Future Smart Grid in USA

Some of the needs include:

Improving reliability

Improving security

Integrated with the information technology

Connect homes to the electrical system in a way that they can organize themselves

It looks something that can be interesting for this project as we can read from the IE homepage